Over the weekend we started to trickle out the first Golden Ticket invites to VaultPress. This means that if you’re on the list you now have a semi-random chance of being one of the first people who can sleep more soundly at night because of VaultPress.

The real-time nature, security aspects, and robustness of VaultPress means that it has lots of moving bits, so we’re controlling the growth of the service through the invite system. We’ve started out by sending out 30 invites a day and will gradually grow that over the next few months.

Early customers are getting a lifetime discount applied to their subscription, and then the prices will go up to their premium level when we open the doors up more.

If you’d like to move ahead in the line, write a blog post about why you want to use VaultPress and link it here, or tweet why you need your site protected by VaultPress and use the hash tag #vaultpress.

30 Responses to First Golden Tickets

Morning guys, I believe that VaultPress is the ideal solution, for all bloggers like me to protect and back up our blogs in today’s world. We put so much work and hours into them and so often some of us see our efforts go to vain because of some idiot hacker or service outage. I truly believe that this is the ultimate life saver. Thanks guys, looking forward to being able to implement this in my blogs. I found this last night and couldn’t wait to share it on one of my blogs, check it out. Keep up the good work!!

I left two comments here (second after I didn’t see first after several days). Luckily I have a backup 🙂 of long comments

* Does it transfer only WP folder and files or other from installation too (eg. if we have /forum or if there is a cache folder)?

* Does it transfer only WP tables in database or other too (eg. if we have bbPress in same database or multiple installations)?

*After initial backup, how do you track what files were changed (and I don’t mean media files)?

* You said “it’s real time”. Do you transfer whole database or just parts that are changed? How do you know when something is changed in database: by using WP hooks or what?

* Does it have revisions so that we can restore to some older one if we don’t notice issue immediately and does it offer some comparison?

*How deletion is made? This is my biggest concern that is not taken into account about online backup solutions. I remember a case of Web Hosting Talk when someone accessed their backups and deleted them, so they couldn’t restore easily.

Since access data is saved in plain text, attacker can access backups too. I always thought about adding duplicate level of access to online backup accounts: first for writing, second for management. This way attacker can’t remove backups even if they get access data from server.

Because of this, solutions like Amazon S3 (and also simple backing-up to same server) weren’t reliable to me and I prefer backing up to remote place without access from server (like email)

This is a long list, but I think that since there is no trial, users should know in advance how service works so that they don’t come into situation where they had wrong assumptions which costed them in losing something (money, data or time).

1. It tries to ignore cache folders, and it won’t backup arbitrary non-WordPress software.
2. It’s focused on WordPress and plugin tables, so bbPress is not currently covered.
3. We track which files change by WordPress hooks and periodically scanning directories.
4. After the initial full backup we only transfer diffs so it’s a lot faster and more efficient.
5. It saves revisions (snapshots) so you can roll back to a previous version of yoru site.
6. There are no mechanisms to delete backups.
7. You can restore from the big download file we give you, or our concierge service will do it for you. In the future there will be a server-to-server option.
8. VaultPress can back up any number of blogs, but right now we’re limiting it to one.
9. We’re English-only right now, but will add other languages as demand indicates.

This is a wonderful development. I can’t think of a better company or team of people to whom I would entrust the responsibility of backing up my WordPress blog.

Having faced the horror of server breakdown and the very painful process of restoration of content from different locations – I welcome this as one of the most significant developments in the WordPress recently. I would put it right up there with the launch of WordPress 3.0, since blog backup is always a primary concern for many publishers.

You are doing the WordPress community a great service by launching VaultPress, Matt – and I thank you for that.

I have applied for the golden ticket and I hope I am one of the first guys who gets an invite.

I was so excited to hear about Vault Press. I design WordPress sites for small business and my every effort goes towards empowering these users to be able to take care of their sites themselves. The one thing that a lot of them are just not ever going to do is use an FTP program to backup their WP content files. This stops them from upgrading versions themselves or they do it anyway and jeopardize their custom designs or I have to hound them to pay me to do backup their sites and upgrade them (which is not my favorite thing to do).

This is an answer to my prayers. I have tried a couple of other systems but I have never felt confident they they were actually backing things up, because sometime they would but… sometimes – if the database was too big or if the client had a certain host- the back-up wouldn’t go through.

Having to check up on the service to see whether or not this service did what it was suppose to do when it is supposed to make your life easier by taking it off your mind and your too do list, is more trouble than doing it manually.